WE HAVE DESCRIBED the views of Linguistic Philosophy on
language and on philosophy, and it is time to turn to its view
of the world. Officially, it has none. (Officially it is sometimes
claimed not to be a theory of anything.) It often considers the
pursuit of world-views to be the cardinal sin of thought. Alternatively, it claims to be neutral with regard to all substantive
questions about the world. In fact, however, it does have an
interesting, indeed striking, view of the world, which can, as
shown, be elicited from its presuppositions, its procedural rules,
its criteria of what counts as a solution, and from certain key
slogans, and from occasional confessions.

The kernel of that view of the world is something that may
strike one as so true, so all-embracing, so accurate a proposition
as to merit being called the secret of the universe. I shall now
disclose this Secret of the Universe. Its first formulation is:

The world is what it is.

It will be objected that this is a trivial tautology; to dress it
up as the secret of the universe, a feeble joke; to attribute it to
a serious philosophic movement, a silly travesty.

On the contrary, suitably interpreted, it is a powerful idea.
Far from being a mere joke, the joke is on those who do not
see its full implications: for past, pre-linguistic philosophy
implicitly denied this principle, trivial though it may seem when
so simply formulated.

Pre-linguistic philosophy implicitly contradicted it by supposing that the world could somehow be a different place according to whether this or that concept was employed to describe it. The power of the seemingly trivial proposition emerges
if it is read in the light of the theory of language expounded
earlier. For philosophic questions generally do not concern individual cases: they do not enquire whether this or that individual falls under some concept; whether this action is right, that

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